Pathway to Peace
Colossians Series
CCCAG 6-25-23
Scripture- Colossians 3:11-4:1
Today we are going to be closing our series on the book of Colossians with a message about seeking peace in our lives.
Peace is one of those things that really sells today. Whole industries exist to promote the idea of peace-
Psychiatrists and psychologists
Pharmaceuticals
Music
Seminars
All exist to help people find peace.
Peace is important to us on a deep level. None of us want to live in a constant state of conflict and war either externally or internally.
Today we are going to be exploring a pathway to peace on both sides- the world the exists on the outside and how we walk toward peace on the inside.
Let’s start with the outside.
When I went through basic training the first time, I had a senior drill sergeant named SFC Monk. Sergeant Monk was about 6’5, 250 pounds of muscle. The other thing that distinguished him was that he was very black.
After they did the whole shark attack thing when we got off the bus, and then told us to get into something resembling a formation. An interesting thing happened- the black soldiers all formed into one squad, the Hispanics in another, and the Caucasian soldiers into the other two squads. Drill Sergeant Monk saw how we had formed up, and we learned what the term “being smoked” was all about. Basically, it’s calisthenics, usually pushups, leg raises, sit-ups until you want to die. It’s done for two reasons- the first is you have to pass a PT test at the end of basic training so this helps you get into shape. The second reason is to teach you the consequences of not living up to an Army value. Once the third person threw up, Drill Sergeant Monk told us to stand back up and listen to him.
He asked, how many people here consider themselves southerners?
About half of the people raised their hands.
He then said, if you are a southern white man, I want you to turn around and find the nearest black man. He is your battle buddy. You will bunk with him, you will eat with him, you will pull guard with him. If he goes somewhere, you go somewhere and vice versa. If I ever find you without your battle buddy, I will smoke you until you beg me for death.
Everyone else, I want you to find a fellow soldier of a different race. If you can’t find that, then someone from the north is with someone from the south. Someone from a city is teamed with a someone from the country. I want everyone to be paired with someone who you have nothing in common with, and you will learn the Army values of loyalty to each other and respect for your fellow soldiers. You are no longer white, black, brown, Latinos or anything else other than Army Green.
It was my first adult experience idea of unity through diversity.
However, it’s not just an Army value- it has its roots in the church.
When we talk about unity through diversity, the first organization that dealt with this is the church.
Initially in the church, there was a lot of drama-
What do we do with the Gentiles?
Do they need to become Jews before the can be Christians?
When Jesus died and rose again, he gave specific instructions that this Gospel was to go out into the entire world. Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.
Jesus then gave Peter a special vision that told him that all people that come to Christ are cleansed and purified in His sight and should not be treated any differently than his Jewish brethren. At the same time, Jesus then saved Saul of Tarsus, gave him the name Paul, and sent him specifically to the Gentiles world, all while writing much of the New Testament.
This was a huge culture shock to the early church, and they had several theological scuffles over it that threatened to destroy the peace that Jesus had just died to give them.
That’s part of the reason that Paul, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, wrote to the church at Colossae.
Paul wanted them to experience God’s peace in every part of their private and their church life.
We are going to go through this section of scripture a few verses at a time. We will see first how Jesus wants us to think about those inside and outside the church, so that his church can be part of the pathway toward having peace that we all desire.
Colossians 3:11
11 Here there is no Gentile or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all, and is in all. 12 Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience.
Prayer
Paul is a Hebrew rabbi, and Rabbi’s have a specific way of teaching truth. First they state the truth, and then expound on all of the ways that truth is lived out. Jesus did the same thing in his teaching.
That’s what we are going to do this morning.
Lay out the truth,
Break it down
Bring it back together as a fully formed ethic to live by.
Here is the truth- In the verses we just read say that if you are in Christ, all of the things you were born with mean nothing.
This flies in the face of everything today’s culture teaches us.
In the Kingdom of God, that the church is supposed to represent, it’s Christ, and Christ alone.
There is no Irish pride
No Norwegian pride- even if we all know we are God’s chosen…we still can’t take pride in it.
There is no black pride
There is no white pride
There is definitely no gay pride. Sorry LGBTQ+, gay pride will not exist in heaven any more than it should on earth.
When we talk about this kind of pride, it causes many people to bristle under that, and we aren’t alone.
This was a very hard pill for the early church to swallow. After all, the Jewish people had been the Chosen of God for thousands of years- and they took a lot of pride in that.
For a Jewish person, who grew up all of their lives looking at all non-Jews as barely even human, this was a huge hurdle for them to jump over for them.
Then you have the Gentiles- all of the non-Jewish people- that is you and me by the way. The Gentiles were defined by their diversity. They all had different ancestries, traditions, beliefs, and ways of doing things that were offensive to each other, and especially to the Jewish people.
Throw all of those people into a church, with leadership who themselves were freshly saved and untrained, and you have a recipe for church drama.
This is why God The Holy Spirit had Paul write this truth-
There is no hyphenation in the Kingdom of God. You are not a white-Christian, a black Christian, a Hispanic Christian.
You are a Christian, period.
Christianity is all about Jesus. Jesus is the one who died and rose again to pay the price for our sins.
Therefore, we are to look past our differences, and forgive and accept each other. Skin color and ancestry are secondary in the Kingdom of God, and have no bearing on your faith in Jesus or your love and allegiance to His church.
Regardless of all of that, the person sitting next to you is your brother or your sister even if they are lighter, darker, or speak a different language, we are all one in Christ Jesus.
That leads us to our next few verses-
13 Bear with each other and forgive one another if any of you has a grievance against someone. Forgive as the Lord forgave you. 14 And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity.
It’s almost as if God is answering the unasked question- “How do I forgive those who do horrible things to me.
God is saying here in his WORD-“I’m glad you asked!”
Central in this thought is the solution- “Forgive as the LORD forgave you!”
There have been a lot of songs about the cross and the nails that held Jesus on the cross, about the passion of His suffering, and the humiitation he experienced as he bled and died for our sins.
But you know, it wasn’t nails that held him on the cross.
It wasn’t toughness that enabled him to carry the cross to the place of execution.
LOVE did all of that. Think about that for a minute.
Jesus is God
Nails can’t hold down God.
Listen- Jesus at any point could have caused the nails to vanish, the wounds and pain to instantly be healed, and the hillside filled with crosses containing all of those who hurt him that day.
But He didn’t….why? (Pause)
Because He loves you, and wants to forgive you and HE will if you simply turn from your old way of life and follow HIM.
I need you to see the secret toward forgiving those who hurt you-
Forgiveness is dependent on the virtue of love. That word for Love there in the Greek language that this letter was originally written in is “Agape”, the Greek word meaning a selfless, God kind of love.
This is the LOVE that held Jesus on the cross, and the kind of love you will need to truly love others.
I can’t tell you how many people I’ve met, and I’m sure you have also that hold onto unforgiveness. I’ve known highly successful people who were stung a betrayal in their lives and you see if every day in their countenance, words, and actions and it gets worse as time goes on.
They never forgave and moved on toward healing.
Listen my friends, the most toxic thing you can hold onto is unforgiveness.
Fat and cholesterol can damage your heart, but not like unforgiveness. It’s a cancer that immediately begins to metastasize and spread throughout your entire being- body soul and spirit. It’s the trap of satan to keep you under his control, and if you don’t let the Agape love of God in then you will stay under the control of the realm of darkness, and it will destroy your soul.
The first thing it will do is steal your peace, and Paul recognizes it when he continues his teachings-
15 Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, since as members of one body you were called to peace. And be thankful. 16 Let the message of Christ dwell among you richly as you teach and admonish one another with all wisdom through psalms, hymns, and songs from the Spirit, singing to God with gratitude in your hearts. 17 And whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.
In addition to forgiveness, Paul gives us a central idea here-
Conflict, war, and hatred were never intended for any of us. That’s why they hurt so much when it happens. It’s all rooted in fear.
Fear is a powerful spiritual acid to your soul. It corrodes you at the deepest levels, affecting and infecting every single thing you do in life.
That’s why this idea of peace is central to our faith. It’s seen throughout the scriptures, both OT and NT. It was such a part of Jewish culture that it was how they greeted one another. Instead of saying hello, they would say, “Shalom” which is the Hebrew word for peace.
Why was that?
Because God’s name is peace. By wishing peace upon those they came into contact with, they were in essence saying,
May the presence of Adonai bring HIS peace upon you.
They were not necessarily asking for a sense of not being afraid, they were calling down the God of the universe to come upon you so you don’t have to be afraid.
If you struggle with this- please listen closely-
If you have a fear- bring God into it.
If you have a problem, bring God into it
If you have a sin you struggle with, invite God into it.
Many of you just had a hard stop in your brain when I said “Invite God into your sin”.
Guess what, He is already there. (Psalm- where can I go to flee from your presence?)
Illustration-
If you wake up in the middle of the middle of the night with crushing pain in your chest, do you go into a closet, turn off the lights, shut off your cell phone, and suffer through it?
No, you invite the doctor to come and help you.
So invite God in no matter what is happening in your life. I’m not saying you ask him to bless your sin- that would be impossible as God cannot do things against His own nature, but invite him in so he can bring healing and strength to resist and run from it.
Then you will have peace, which I would define as the manifest presence of God in your life.
That’s the start of your pathway toward peace.
We will begin to end today with a few practical ways that God’s manifest presence can help in your lives, and they are seen at the end of Colossians 3.
3:18–4:1 18 Wives, submit yourselves to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord. 19 Husbands, love your wives and do not be harsh with them. 20 Children, obey your parents in everything, for this pleases the Lord. 21 Fathers, do not embitter your children, or they will become discouraged.
Here God shows how his presence changes the dynamics of everything in life, even in our families.
To briefly break this down-
Wives, submit to you husbands, as to the LORD.
Men, I know your ears just perked up, and you are triple underlining this verse in your bible. Their wives arms just crossed, and they are now stone faced looking at me.
Hang on for a minute, because wifely submission is a conditional phrase. Whenever the bible talks about wives’ submission, the Holy Spirit was VERY VERY deliberate to put this condition onto it.
Wives are to submit, as onto the LORD- that’s the part that need to be triple underlined in your bibles men.
In other words, men show them Jesus through your words and actions, and 99% of the woman I have every talked to about this- even the most stubborn alpha females you’d ever meet- they would be happy to submit.
You may ask- what does that look like?
Now men, I want you triple underline the next verse also-
Husbands, love your wives and do not be harsh with them.
I’m going to add another few verses here-
Eph 5:25-29
Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself.
It's interesting that in Ephesians, God gives 8 words of instruction to woman to submit to their husbands, but then devotes an entire paragraph telling the men how to treat their wives and why.
I had a funny thought when I was writing this-
God was mansplaining to men how to be men.
So I ask you men-
8 words for woman, 71 words to us.
Who has the greater responsibility and the greater accountability toward God when it comes to a happy marriage?
Just keep that in mind when you pull out the submit to me card.
By the way, it’s not just your wife, it’s your children. We have bought a lie in the 20th and 21st centuries that it’s the woman’s job to raise the children.
Nope- that duty also falls upon us.
Something to keep in mind.
Finally, as well have followed the pathway toward peace in our lives, our marriage, our families, it also can flow down into our jobs.
Now instead of slaves, think employees, and instead of master, think bosses-
22 Slaves, obey your earthly masters in everything; and do it, not only when their eye is on you and to curry their favor, but with sincerity of heart and reverence for the Lord. 23 Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters, 24 since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving. 25 Anyone who does wrong will be repaid for their wrongs, and there is no favoritism. 4 Masters, provide your slaves with what is right and fair, because you know that you also have a Master in heaven.
God has been speaking to me a lot lately about being a thermostat.
I know it sounds like weird thing, but bear with me a moment.
I always have taught that a nation’s prosperity is dependent on the church, not the sinful world. Many of our nation’s issues are because people have fallen away from the church, or those who are left are so lukewarm toward the things of God that His presence has left. When God’s presence leaves, sin and evil run in and flourish.
The same is true in every aspect of our lives. God has really been convicting me in the area of how I act or talk despite how hard things are getting.
I’m starting to ask myself, how are my words and actions affecting the spiritual temperature of the situation?
Am I adding peace by quieting the fear with his presence, or decreasing his presence by adding to the fear?
Close your eyes for a moment and ask yourself that question-
Am I increasing God’s peace (Ask before each bullet)
Am I embracing the gifts and talents of others- valuing them even if they are just like me?
In my own life through forgiving others?
Through giving my fears to God to deal with
In my home in how I treat my wife and children
In my world, in now I act in front of others to bring the Kingdom of God and all of it’s power, provision, and peace to a situation.
All rise.
Prayer
